ick
to guiding, or would you take a claim 'way back in the woods and be
independent of people?"

For the first time Joe brightened. He chewed his cud a second, and
bubbled, "I've often thought of that! If I had the money, I'd go down to
Tinker's Falls and open a swell shoe store."

After supper Joe proposed a game of stud-poker but Babbitt refused with
brevity, and Joe contentedly went to bed at eight. Babbitt sat on the
stump, facing the dark pond, slapping mosquitos. Save the snoring guide,
there was no other human being within ten miles. He was lonelier than he
had ever been in his life. Then he was in Zenith.

He was worrying as to whether Miss McGoun wasn't paying too much for
carbon paper. He was at once resenting and missing the persistent
teasing at the Roughnecks' Table. He was wondering what Zilla Riesling
was doing now. He was wondering whether, after the summer's maturity
of being a garageman, Ted would "get busy" in the university. He was
thinking of his wife. "If she would only--if she wouldn't be so darn
satisfied with just settling down--No! I won't! I won't go back! I'll
be fifty in three years. Sixty in thirteen years. I'm going to have some
fun before it's too late. I don't care! I will!"

He thought of Ida Putiak, of Louetta Swanson, of that nice widow--what
was her name?--Tanis Judique?--the one for whom he'd found the flat. He
was enmeshed in imaginary conversations. Then:

"Gee, I can't seem to get away from thinking about folks!"

Thus it came to him merely to run away was folly, because he could never
run away from himself.

That moment he started for Zenith. In his journey there was no
appearance of flight, but he was fleeing, and four days afterward he was
on the Zenith train. He knew that he was slinking back not because it
was what he longed to do but because it was all he could do. He scanned
again his discovery that he could never run away from Zenith and family
and office, because in his own brain he bore the office and the family
and every street and disquiet and illusion of Zenith.

"But I'm going to--oh, I'm going to start something!" he vowed, and he
tried to make it valiant.

CHAPTER XXVI

I

As he walked through the train, looking for familiar faces, he saw only
one person whom he knew, and that was Seneca Doane, the lawyer who,
after the blessings of being in Babbitt's own class at college and
of becoming a corporation-counsel, had turned crank, had headed
farm